The Second Coming
of C. S. Lewis

Alan Jacobs

A few years ago, when the English novelist A. N. Wilson announced his
repudiation of Christianity, the story was reported in Christianity
Today. On the face of it this seemed an odd "event" for CT to
cover. Wilson's novels had often, though not always, shown an interest
in religious experience, and since the books were all set in England,
the religion treated in them was of course Christianity; but the reader
would have no reason to conclude from any of Wilson's novels that he was
in fact a Christian believer. He was, but his books bear no witness; far
less do they preach. The most that can be said for them along those
lines is that by taking spiritual experience seriously they might have
the effect of encouraging others to do so. This is indeed something-but
enough to justify a CT report on their author's apostasy? (Wilson also
published, in 1984, a rather fuzzy-minded book about Christian belief
called How Can We Know?, but since it was not widely read in
England, and sank utterly without a trace in the U.S., it is not likely
that it had caught the attention of CT's editors.)

No, the notice that CT gave to Wilson's declaration of unbelief was
produced by his association with a figure whose importance to the
magazine's readership is unquestioned: C. S. Lewis. The association was
created by Wilson's biography of Lewis, but it was not just in that
capacity that Wilson was of interest to Christians in America. Rather,
when it became known that Wilson was working on the Lewis biography, all
his previous works came under scrutiny and were interpreted in light of
a hopeful possibility: perhaps Wilson would be that figure for whom so
many have been waiting for so long, The Next C. S. Lewis. His apostasy
was newsworthy to CT not because Wilson is a noted novelist, nor even,
strictly speaking, because he is a Lewis biographer, but rather because
it marked the disappointment of those expectations regarding the all-
too-long delayed succession.

It is currently fashionable among literary scholars to write histories
of reputations. A noted case, some years back, was John Rodden's book
The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "St.
George" Orwell, about which many reviewers rightly complained that
Rodden had failed to consider whether the quality of Orwell's mind and
writing mightn't have played at least a minor role in the growth of his
reputation. I don't want to repeat Rodden's mistake; it would certainly
be erroneous to neglect, when considering the popularity of C. S. Lewis,
the man's considerable virtues as a scholar, rhetorician, and
storyteller. Nevertheless, it is worth considering the possibility that
someone else with all those virtues might never have reached Lewis'
level of popularity and authority; which is to say that those literary
critics who argue that there is a sociology of reputation that operates,
at least to a degree, independently of a writer's intrinsic qualities
are on to something worth thinking about.

What, then, are the Lewisian paraphernalia that enabled him to become so
popular and so influential-especially among American Christians?

The first point to note is, of course, that Lewis was British. This, for
Americans, confers an immediate air of culture and sophistication-
something of which American Christians, especially of the evangelical
variety, have long felt themselves in some need of an infusion. (By way
of contrast, among the cultured English, Lewis would be immediately
suspect because he was not English, but rather an Ulsterman. To
Americans, though, a Brit is a Brit.)

This air of sophistication is boosted immeasurably by Lewis' status as
an Oxford don. Though he taught at Cambridge for the last ten years of
his life, he was always associated in the public mind with Oxford-which
is good, since, for a variety of reasons far too complicated to go into
here (among the more obvious being the Rhodes Scholarships), Oxford has
always been more prominent in the American consciousness than Cambridge.
Americans are always stunned to learn that no Oxford college can boast
the roster of political, intellectual, and artistic titans associated
with Trinity College, Cambridge. Moreover, both Oxford and Cambridge
still, though not as thoroughly as in the past, dominate their culture
in ways that no set of American universities has ever been able to
reproduce. The intellectual force of the United States is far more
widely distributed; and for that reason, association with any American
university, even Harvard or Yale, cannot carry the same weight as Lewis'
Oxford connection.

But if Americans are known for their tendency to fawn over certified
European cultural sophistication, they are also known for their dislike
of pretension, and here too Lewis fits the bill-though in making this
point I find myself speaking about a quality that Lewis as a writer
actually possesses, as well as the perceptions that quality engenders. I
mentioned Orwell earlier, and his case is in this respect remarkably
similar to that of Lewis. Each is noted for the direct forcefulness of
his style, for his ability to cut straight through his opponents'
thickets of obfuscation, for a let-us-clear-our-minds-of-cant bluntness.
One thinks of some of the justly famous lines from Orwell's most-quoted
essay, "Politics and the English Language": "The great enemy of clear
language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and
one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words
and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." And perhaps
the most notable example of such bluntness in Lewis comes in Mere
Christianity, when he responds to the notion that Jesus was a
"great moral teacher":

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of
things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He
would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says
he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the
Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can
shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as
a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and
God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about
His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open
to us. He did not intend to.

The styles of the two men, though their beliefs about religion and
perhaps politics too were nigh unto opposite, are very close indeed;
they both grow out of a peculiarly English tradition of "plain common
sense" that can seem to be a bright sunbeam shining into that night of
the mind in which all cats are gray. This style itself, or rather the
mastery with which Orwell and Lewis employ it, is almost sufficient in
itself to explain why their admirers have sometimes dared to use the
word "saint" to describe them.

If my descriptions of this style seem ambivalent, that is because I am
aware that the blunt commonsense manner tends to disarm the critical
faculties, especially of those who already share the beliefs of the
writer. The unbeliever, on the other hand, while he or she might admire
Lewis' rhetorical facility, might also pause to note that his argument
holds only if we agree in advance that the Gospels provide an accurate
account of what Jesus said. (It is also, perhaps, worth noting that
Lewis' rhetorical style probably cost him as many English admirers as it
got him, especially among those who knew him personally and hence saw a
yet more pronounced bluntness: even the poet W. H. Auden, who admired
Lewis greatly, told a friend that he wished Lewis had been sent to a
finishing school.)

Those who take pleasure in the direct unpretentiousness of Lewis' style
also tend to be pleased that Lewis was not a professional theologian.
Indeed, Lewis frequently insisted on his status as a theological
amateur. For instance, in a preface he wrote for The Screwtape
Letters some years after the book's original appearance, we find
these modest words:

Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by
supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of
many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot
that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable,
way of learning how temptation works. "My heart"-I need no
other's-"showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly."

There is no reason to doubt that Lewis meant wholeheartedly what he said
here, and yet it is also true that he was deeply learned in the history
of Christian theology, as anyone who has read his works of literary
history (which are filled with remarkable interdisciplinary erudition)
can attest; and while he does not directly employ that erudition in
Screwtape, there is no doubt that he drew upon it in formulating
his understanding of diabolical activity. But even though Lewis had read
more theology than many theologians, the fact that he was not by
profession a theologian helped him doubly: not only did it fit nicely
with his unpretentious style, it also enabled him to recognize, more
readily than a professional absorbed in the concerns of his discipline,
which disputes are too recondite to interest the reader with limited
theological knowledge.

That Lewis was a storyteller and lover of stories as well as a
philosopher and lover of argument was very important. I know of a
married couple-there must be thousands of similar stories-who got to
know one another because each claimed C. S. Lewis as a favorite writer;
even though his Lewis was the author of Miracles and
hers was the author of the Narnia books. Since Lewis
wrote stories and arguments concurrently, almost from the beginning of
his career (poetry, actually, was his first love and hope for literary
fame), one could never plausibly accuse him of being either a too-rigid
rationalist or a fuzzy-brained weaver of tales.

And finally, that Lewis was an Anglican, and therefore liable to be
claimed with almost equal plausibility by people on both sides of that
via media, helped to minimize denominational bickering-
especially in America-and keep his audience broadly distributed through
Christendom. (In this respect it is perhaps fortunate that his decision
to use-as purportedly the most even-handed term to describe Christians
who follow Rome-the word "Papist" comes in one of his more scholarly and
less widely read books. Even the mature Lewis still had something of the
Ulster Prot in his bones.)

If a pattern has emerged through this enumeration of contributing
factors to C. S. Lewis' influence, it is that he represents a remarkable
number of both/ands: both learned and unpretentious, both logical and
artistic, both Catholic and Protestant. It is the collection of
qualities, and perceived qualities, that would be so enormously hard to
replicate. And that is why so many potential successors have gone by the
wayside. Both G. K. Chesterton-whose reputation in this country (like
that of George Macdonald) derives in considerable part from Lewis'
praise of him-and Malcolm Muggeridge, as mere journalists, lacked the
intellectual pedigree of the Oxford don. Moreover, Chesterton's
reputation among non-Catholics, though bolstered by his work in
both fiction and argumentation, has been hurt by what became his
enthusiastic embrace of Catholicism and subsequent critique of
Protestantism; while Muggeridge's heterodoxy on some significant
doctrinal issues, plus his frequently and cheerfully confessed ignorance
of theology, have limited his influence too. Dorothy Sayers also lacked
the don's stature, but one suspects that her gender is the more
important reason for the relative neglect of her interesting apologetic
works. A more recent candidate, in the minds of some, is the
extraordinarily (some would say dismayingly) prolific Alister McGrath,
who, after receiving his doctorate in biochemistry, abandoned science
for theological studies and is now a lecturer in theology at Oxford. But
however impressive his resume may be, McGrath's instincts as a
professional theologian don't always serve him well in his popular
works. He does not possess Lewis' knack for knowing when to simplify and
when to pursue an issue in depth; and, more important in my view, his
prose style is at best pedestrian, completely lacking in the rhetorical
flair that each of the other candidates I have mentioned possessed in
considerable measure (as does, I might add, A. N. Wilson).

The vocabulary employed throughout this essay requires some examination:
What does it mean here to talk about "candidates" and "the succession"?
Candidates for what? Succession to what? The position held by Lewis is,
I believe, that of Unofficial Spokesman for Orthodox Christianity; and I
also believe that many Christians tend to assume that someone has always
held, or should hold, that position, when in fact Lewis has been
virtually unique in this respect. Chesterton before him-whom Lewis
clearly considered his great predecessor-never had the broad authority
that Lewis would come to assume; and once you go back beyond Chesterton,
into a Victorian world that was at least nominally Christian through and
through, the idea of such a spokesman for the faith quickly becomes
anachronistic.

Thus the idea that we Christians should be looking for the next Lewis,
and moreover should be deeply concerned if we do not find him (or her),
may well be fundamentally misbegotten-very like the increasing concern
among evangelicals about who will succeed Billy Graham. (He had no real
predecessors either-what I said about Chesterton applies in equal
measure to Billy Sunday, whose reputation and influence grew after his
death.) For both Lewis and Graham there is no reason to suppose that
there will be a successor in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor is
there any reason to suppose that the Christian church will be worse off
if no successor is found. The real danger, in fact, is that obsessive
scanning of the intellectual skies for The Next C. S. Lewis will prevent
thinking Christians from taking action themselves to meet the challenges
of our time-as Lewis sought, with considerable success, to meet the
challenges of his. I mean this in two senses.

First, there is the danger that people will wait for the titanic new
figure to stride onto the stage instead of settling down themselves to
the business of defending the faith. It is worth remembering that when
Lewis started writing his apologetic works there was no way for him or
anyone else to know how enormous his authority would eventually become.
He considered himself just one Christian writer among many, not even
primus inter pares. He was perfectly aware that his approach to
the Christian faith-though he strove to make it as uncontroversial as
possible-would not appeal to all readers; there is not the slightest
inclination in Lewis' life or work that he thought discomfort with his
writings amounted to discomfort with Christianity. And yet for many of
Lewis' admirers this distinction is hard to make.

Second, there is the danger that Lewis will so dominate our picture of
what a Christian apologist should be that we will be looking for someone
to address the challenges of fifty years ago, not today-someone who has
a response to Freud or Marx but not to Richard Rorty or Andrea Dworkin.
Lewis wrote in a time when, among the educated British public if not
among their professional philosophers, there was considerably more
agreement than there is now about, for instance, what constitutes a
valid and rational argument for a given case. (Though Screwtape-whom
Lewis should have listened to a little more carefully on this point-
notes in his very first letter that the historical period has passed in
which "the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and
when it was not.") His apologetic works presuppose, and rarely make any
argument for, the criteria for rationality themselves. Today those
criteria simply cannot be assumed, and yet many Christians still persist
in assuming them. Not long ago in Christianity Today a guest
columnist pointed to a troubling finding from a recent poll: only 28
percent of Americans claim to have a strong belief in absolute truth.
Confronted with this disturbing news, the columnist's recommendation was
that preachers need to devote more homiletic time to "set[ting] forth
the exclusive claims of Christ as rationally superior" to other
alternatives.

Perhaps I am missing something, but it seems to me truly extraordinary
to expect that people who do not believe in absolute truth will, all the
same, believe in rational argument. In fact, it is almost certain that
they will not believe in rational argument, and in response to the
"exclusive claims" of Christ will take refuge in relativism or, more
likely, a pragmatic perspectivism-that is, in its simplest form, the
"That's great if it works for you, but it doesn't work for me" response.
(In England it's known as the "Right you are if you think you are"
response.) One may be able to provide a powerful summation of evidence
for the empty tomb, but that will not convince the unbeliever who is
skeptical about the very notion of "evidence" and who can discourse
learnedly about "plausibility structures" and "paradigm shifts"-nor will
it move that other variety of unbeliever who is far more likely to
believe that Jesus gave sight to the blind and rose from the dead than
to believe that no one comes to the Father except through Him.

For these and other reasons it is an open question whether orthodox
Christians' continued fascination with Lewis is a good or a bad thing.
There is much to be gained from reading him; I say this as one who has
over the last fifteen years drawn considerable spiritual nourishment
from his cornucopia of works, and who expects to draw more in the
future. But more attention must be given to following his example rather
than imitating his productions-that is, to making the case for
Christianity to our world rather than to his. Lewis wrote most of his
major apologetic works more than fifty years ago, and in this century
fifty years is a long, long time. Moreover, we must acknowledge that the
likelihood of finding another such figure-that is, a single Christian
writer endowed with comparable gifts and an equally ideal positioning
for cultural authority-is very slight, and perhaps not worthy of our
hopes. To be sure, what is true for all of us is equally true for
Christian apologists: many are called, few are chosen. But we need not
reduce the few to a solitary one.

Alan Jacobs teaches in the English Department at Wheaton College in
Illinois.